Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:06:21 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

>A language with zero redundancy would be highly brittle, such that any
>amount of noise would make an utterance mean something different, equally
>grammatical and meaningful -- is that really "efficient" in any meaningful
>sense?
I don't think that would be necessarily "brittle" however. Don't forget good ol'
Context. Sure, if changing [ts`] to [ts\] resulted in a change of "three"
to "seven", misunderstandings would be commonplace. But if the change in
meaning were from "we caught three mice in the basement yesterday"
to "Jupiter plus marshmallows is occasionally a fantastic cattle-prod" ... not so
much.

Granted, there's little dout that a morphophonology that consistently behaved
like this would have to be ridiculously complex and probably too hard to be
humanly lernable ... but that's just the other end of the spectrum.
Compromising a bit, "three" to "aquamarine" would be alreddy much less
confusing, and "three mice" to "running along" even better, and probably still
rather accomplishable. (CF: Chinese & monosyllables.)

John Vertical

Reply